More Than One in Five Consumer Broadband Lines Now Come with VoIP

19/10/10By Claire WestVoice over IP is becoming increasingly important to service providers and achieving significant penetration of the consumer market according to the latest figures from leading industry analysts Point Topic."Over 22% of consumer broadband lines worldwide now come with a voice over IP service. Passing 100 million subscriptions by the end of 2009 VoIP has continued to grow adding another 12 million subscribers in the first half of 2010," said Point Topic's Senior Analyst John Bosnell.There are some markets now where it is very difficult and not generally cost effective to subscribe to broadband without a VoIP service thrown...

...in. France Telecom for example offer one relatively low speed consumer stand-alone broadband subscription but a wide range of higher speed bundles."France is a stand out example. Fierce competition has been encouraged and ISPs like Free, who only offer bundled services which include VoIP, have helped drive consumer perception towards the expectation of low cost add on services from their ISPs and VoIP is relatively easy and cost effective solution," said Bosnell.This trend has meant that over 70% of French households now have a VoIP service available to them and saturation is now a significant factor. Other markets have more headroom. While there are not many targets left amongst French broadband subscribers and other markets are quickly converting much of their remaining subscriber base there are significant absentees from the 'top 10' chart above."China, the largest broadband market, has only one in 20 broadband subscriptions with a VoIP bundle. The US which is currently the largest VoIP market in absolute terms is closing in on one in three mainly due to cable companies offering their customers a voice service based on VoIP. So there's plenty of headroom there and around the world," added Bosnell.At the end of 2009 just... continued on page two >